#ten portraits of jews in the twentieth century

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Emma Riva

Andy Warhol painted Mao, machine guns and Marilyn Monroe, but the public was scandalized in 1980 when he painted Jews.

The New York Times claimed that Warhol’s “Ten Portraits of Jews in the Twentieth Century” “reek[ed] of commercialism, and their contribution to art is nil,” and The Philadelphia Inquirer called the portraits “Jewploitation.”

But this month, Andy Warhol Museum Chief Curator Aaron Levi Garvey, a Jewish curator and historian originally from New York, installed them at the museum.

“I never understood calling these portraits commercial or vapid,” Garvey said. “What of Warhol’s work isn’t commercial? He worked with the idea of what an icon is.”

The 10 Jewish subjects that Warhol, art dealer Ronald Feldman and JCC of Greater Washington Gallery Director Susan Morgenstein selected in 1980 were actress Sarah Bernhardt; United States Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis; philosopher Martin Buber; physicist Albert Einstein; psychologist Sigmund Freud; comedians the Marx Brothers; Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir; songwriter George Gershwin; and writers Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein.

The installation at the Warhol, Garvey said, was initially conceived as a gesture of solidarity coinciding with the five-year commemoration of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

Then the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 happened.

Fear of controversy over highlighting Jews during a period of escalating violence and brutality in Israel — as well as personal antisemitic threats that Garvey said were made against him via email and voicemail — could have caused the Jewish curator to postpone or cancel the exhibit. But he’s no stranger to anti-Jewish hate and decided to go through with the installation.

“People used to carve swastikas into my desk when I was in high school, and I experienced major antisemitism in college,” he said. “I want viewers of ‘Ten Portraits’ to learn and be open to dialogue.”

The portraits share a room on the fourth floor of the Warhol with Keith Haring’s “Untitled (Elephant)” — a literal elephant in the room alongside a figurative one, Garvey noted.

In the lineup of Warhol’s “Jewish geniuses,” as the artist nicknamed them, the views and figures represented are complex. Kafka abandoned Judaism. Bernhardt hid her Jewish identity. Stein supported the Vichy government of France, an actively anti-Jewish regime. Einstein is quoted as saying: “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state” in a 1938 speech entitled “Our Debt to Zionism,” even though he was offered the position of president of Israel.

One of the many things that makes “Ten Portraits” so timely and provocative is that it asks viewers to consider what being a Jewish icon means. All the portraits are of Ashkenazi Jews and speak to a certain image of Jewish identity. However, rather than Jacob Riis-esque tenement photography or depictions of Jewish suffering and tragedy, Warhol highlighted Jewish exceptionalism in the arts, government and sciences.

“I want viewers to think about all of these people in multitudes, in a non-linear fashion,” Garvey said. “It’s about Jewish exceptionalism but in a multitude of ways. All of the subjects contain multitudes. In the wall text, I put that Martin Buber was a Zionist philosopher. Someone told me I couldn’t say that, and I was like, ‘Well, that’s what he was,’” Garvey recalled.

Garvey said that the museum’s internal response to the installation has been mixed, including various complaints that misidentified Garvey’s ethnicity and some inflammatory antisemitic remarks. But nonetheless, Garvey and Warhol Director Patrick Moore co-signed an exhibition statement calling for peace and solidarity.

[lascitasdelashoras]

Franz Kafka en un detalle de Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, de Andy Warhol

[sardens]

Andy Warhol - George Gershwin, from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century

[100-art]

Ten Famous Jews of the 20th Century by Warhol Pop Art Portraits Art Print

Series of Ten famous Jews of the twentieth century, 1980 Sarah Bernhardt Sigmund Freud Gertrude Stein Franz Kafka Albert Einstein Marx Brothers Golda Meir Martin Buber Louis Brandeis George Gershwin

[oncanvas]

Franz Kafka from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Andy Warhol, 1980

Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board 40 x 32 ⅛ in. (101.6 x 81.6 cm) Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, USA

[myheartmakespop]

La eterna vuelta a los años 80

Si hay una época que ha quedado marcada en el inconsciente colectivo son los años 80. Tanto para nostálgicos como para quienes realmente ni habían nacido, se suelen traer de vuelta aspectos característicos de esta década. Pero, ¿qué sucedió en la cultura pop de esos años?

Se caracterizan por ser los años más visuales gracias a la llegada de los videoclips, los videojuegos y los primeros móviles, entre tantos artistas que hoy día son referencia para muchos. La estética ochentera, sus iconos y su espíritu encantan a las masas, por eso no es de extrañar que hayan sido explotados por la industria de la moda y del entretenimiento.

Varios ejemplos de la actualidad que se ambientan en estos años son: Stranger Things (televisión), It (cine), The Time of My Life (libros), Crossing Souls (videojuegos), uso de sintetizadores o la venta de vinilos (música), camisetas de grupos de la época (moda) e incluso los filtros de fotos que imitan la estética de las Polaroid y la textura de las cintas VHS (móviles).

A continuación os contamos 7 imprescindibles de los años 80 que la hicieron una de las épocas más recordadas y felices:

1. Los videojuegos Atari

Usando un sistema basado en cartuchos que permitía a los usuarios jugar una variedad de videojuegos, la consola Atari marcó el comienzo de una nueva era en los sistemas de juegos domésticos. El éxito sucedió en 1980 después de que Atari lanzara una versión del videojuego japonés Space Invaders. Las ventas se duplicaron cuando millones compraron la consola para jugar el popular juego de arcade en casa. Otros títulos populares fueron Adventure, Asteroids, Frogger, Pac-Man o Pong.

2. Los casetes

Durante la década de los 80’ el casete se masificó definitivamente como resultado de la llegada al mercado de las grabadoras portátiles de bolsillo y walkman, pequeños reproductores de cassette portátiles con auriculares que permitían al usuario escuchar su música en cualquier momento y en cualquier lugar, y cuyo tamaño no era mucho mayor que el propio casete. El usuario podía grabar en una cinta la selección de música que creyera oportuna y llevarla allí donde quisiera.

3. Los reyes del pop: Madonna y Michael Jackson

La música de los ochenta fue un boom total. A parte de darnos canciones, como Girls just want to have fun de Cindy Lauper o Every breath you take de The Police, fue una época marcada por los reyes del pop. Thriller de Michael Jackson o Like a Virgin de Madonna sonaban en todo momento y marcaron el devenir de la música pop. Lástima que no lograran ponerse de acuerdo para una épica colaboración entre ambos por sus opuestos puntos de vista.

4. El cubo de Rubik

Cuando salió al mercado por primera vez en 1977, el popular juguete recibió el nombre de Cubo Mágico Húngaro. Sin embargo, con la esperanza de algo más atractivo, el nombre se cambió a Cubo de Rubik en 1980 y logró vender 390 millones de cubos durante los siguientes 29 años. Es un imprescindible de la época, muy presente en la actualidad con sus infinitas versiones y dificultades.

5. Éxitos de taquilla: E.T., Regreso al Futuro o Los Cazafantasmas

Hollywood consideró que ya se había arriesgado suficiente durante los años setenta y fue a por lo seguro.  Terminator, Las aventuras de Indiana Jones y Regreso al Futuro fueron las joyas de la corona y con ellas nació el concepto del blockbuster, las películas de verano y la popularización de las franquicias para todos los públicos. Fue la época dorada del cine juvenil, un momento en el que la industria dejó sacar a sus directores y guionistas el niño que todos llevamos dentro.

6. Series: The Simpson, Dynasty o El equipo A

Una de las décadas más prolíficas y veneradas de la televisión americana. Destacaron sobre todo las sitcoms como Alf,  Salvados por la Campana, Seinfeld o Las chicas de oro. También se popularizaron las series de acción y aventura como El coche fantástico, Corrupción en Miami, Los vigilantes de la playa o Se ha escrito un crimen.

7. Arte

El arte de los años 80 puede clasificarse en dos corrientes principales: el neoconceptualismo, que pasó del minimalismo y el conceptualismo a adoptar técnicas de fotografía y apropiación; y el neoexpresionismo, que exhumaba las nociones tradicionales de pintura que habían sido eliminadas por el modernismo.

Centrándonos en el arte más popular, tenemos a Andrew Warhola, más conocido como Andy Warhol como uno de los mayores representantes dentro de su ámbito. Tal es su influencia que existe un museo dedicado a su obra con su nombre en su ciudad natal, Pensilvania. Se trata del museo más grande de Estados Unidos dedicado a un solo artista.

A continuación sus obras más famosas de la década de los años 80:

Orange Prince (1984)

Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980)

Diamond Dust Joseph Beuys (1980)

Fuentes:

https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/mas-historias/20190628/47312240079/por-que-nos-gustan-los-anos-ochenta.html https://www.oxigeno.com.pe/campanas/5-cosas-inolvidables-que-definieron-la-cultura-de-los-80-noticia-1129289 https://bestlifeonline.com/80s-facts/ https://www.britannica.com/technology/Atari-console https://www.guioteca.com/los-80/la-historia-del-cassette-la-forma-mas-popular-de-almacenar-audio-y-musica-en-los-80/ https://www.culturagenial.com/es/arte-pop/ https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol https://domingodecine.com/aquellos-maravillosos-a%C3%B1os-80-95f14caf72a6 https://www.fotogramas.es/series-tv-noticias/g13156261/mejores-series-anos-80/?slide=31

[gacougnol]

Andy Warhol Sarah Bernhardt From "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" 1980

[portraitsgallery]

ANDY WARHOL, Albert Einstein, from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (F. & S. II.229), 1980

[eriksspanishlitblog]

Ten Interesting Novels

 1. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal.  ( Source : goodreads ) 

2. Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas 

In the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, fifty prominent Nationalist prisoners are executed by firing squad. Among them is the writer and fascist Rafael Sanchez Mazas. As the guns fire, he escapes into the forest, and can hear a search party and their dogs hunting him down. The branches move and he finds himself looking into the eyes of a militiaman, and faces death for the second time that day. But the unknown soldier simply turns and walks away. Sanchez Mazas becomes a national hero and the soldier disappears into history. As Cercas sifts the evidence to establish what happened, he realises that the true hero may not be Sanchez Mazas at all, but the soldier who chose not to shoot him. Who was he? Why did he spare him? And might he still be alive? ( Source : Amazon )

3. The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway

The Dangerous Summer is Hemingway's firsthand chronicle of a brutal season of bullfights. In this vivid account, Hemingway captures the exhausting pace and pressure of the season, the camaraderie and pride of the matadors, and the mortal drama as in fight after fight the rival matadors try to outdo each other with ever more daring performances. At the same time Hemingway offers an often complex and deeply personal self-portrait that reveals much about one of the twentieth century's preeminent writers. ( Source : Amazon ) 

4. Cathedral of the Sea: A Novel by Ildefonso Falcones

In the tradition of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, here is a thrilling historical novel of friendship and revenge, plague and hope, love and war, set in the golden age of 14th-century Barcelona. Arnau Estanyol arrives in Barcelona and joins the powerful guild of stone-workers building the magnificent cathedral of Santa Maria del Mar, while his adoptive brother Joan studies to become a priest. As Arnau prospers, he secretly falls in love with a forbidden woman. When he is betrayed and hauled before the Inquisitor, he finds himself face-to-face with his own brother. Will he lose his life just as his beloved cathedral is finally completed, or will his brother spare him? ( Source : Amazon ) 

5. The Fencing Master by Arturo Perez-Reverte 

The unstoppable thrust is the arcane fencing technique known only by Don Jaime—and the deadly maneuver that a beautiful young woman wants him to teach her.What begins as a rather bold request leads Don Jaime into the shadowy politics and violence of mid-nineteenth-century Madrid. ( Source : Amazon )

6. Driving Over Lemons : An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart

No sooner had Chris Stewart set eyes on El Valero than he handed over a check.  Now all he had to do was explain to Ana, his wife that they were the proud owners of an isolated sheep farm in the Alpujarra Mountains in Southern Spain.  That was the easy part. Lush with olive, lemon, and almond groves, the farm lacks a few essentials—running water, electricity, an access road.  And then there's the problem of rapacious Pedro Romero, the previous owner who refuses to leave.  A perpetual optimist, whose skill as a sheepshearer provides an ideal entrée into his new community, Stewart also possesses an unflappable spirit that, we soon learn, nothing can diminish.  Wholly enchanted by the rugged terrain of the hillside and the people they meet along the way—among them farmers, including the ever-resourceful Domingo, other expatriates and artists—Chris and Ana Stewart build an enviable life, complete with a child and dogs, in a country far from home. ( Source : Amazon ) 

7. Winter in Madrid : A Novel by C.J. Sansom

September 1940: the Spanish Civil War is over, Madrid lies in ruin, while the Germans continue their march through Europe, and General Franco evades Hitler's request that he lead his broken country into yet another war. Into this uncertain world comes a reluctant spy for the British Secret Service, sent to gain the confidence of Sandy Forsyth, an old school friend turned shady Madrid businessman. Meanwhile, an ex-Red Cross nurse is engaged in a secret mission of her own. Through this dangerous game of intrigue, C. J. Sansom's riveting tale conjures a remarkable sense of history unfolding and the profound impact of impossible choices. ( Source : Amazon ) 

8. The Last Jew by Noah Gordon 

In the year 1492, the Inquisition has all of Spain in its grip. After centuries of pogrom-like riots encouraged by the Church, the Jews - who have been an important part of Spanish life since the days of the Romans - are expelled from the country by royal edict. Many who wish to remain are intimidated by Church and Crown and become Catholics, but several hundred thousand choose to retain their religion and depart; given little time to flee, some perish even before they can escape from Spain. Yonah Toledano, the 15-year-old son of a celebrated Spanish silversmith, has seen his father and brother die during these terrible days - victims whose murders go almost unnoticed in a time of mass upheaval. Trapped in Spain by circumstances, he is determined to honor the memory of his family by remaining a Jew. ( Source : goodreads ) 

9.The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Ruiz Zafon 

Nine-year-old Alicia lost her parents during the Spanish Civil War when the Nacionales (the fascists) savagely bombed Barcelona in 1938. Twenty years later, she still carries the emotional and physical scars of that violent and terrifying time. Weary of her work as an investigator for Spain’s secret police in Madrid, a job she has held for more than a decade, the twenty-nine-year old plans to move on. At the insistence of her boss, Leandro Montalvo, she remains to solve one last case: the mysterious disappearance of Spain’s Minister of Culture, Mauricio Valls. ( Source : Amazon )

With her partner, the intimidating policeman Juan Manuel Vargas, Alicia discovers a possible clue—a rare book by the author Victor Mataix hidden in Valls’ office in his Madrid mansion. Valls was the director of the notorious Montjuic Prison in Barcelona during World War II where several writers were imprisoned, including David Martín and Victor Mataix. Traveling to Barcelona on the trail of these writers, Alicia and Vargas meet with several booksellers, including Juan Sempere, who knew her parents. ( Source : Amazon ) 

10. The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner 

In this stunning novel, C. W. Gortner brings to life Juana of Castile, the third child of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand of Spain, who would become the last queen of Spanish blood to inherit her country’s throne. Along the way, Gortner takes the reader from the somber majesty of Spain to the glittering and lethal courts of Flanders, France, and Tudor England.  Born amid her parents’ ruthless struggle to unify and strengthen their kingdom, Juana, at the age of sixteen, is sent to wed Philip, heir to the Habsburg Empire. Juana finds unexpected love and passion with her dashing young husband, and at first she is content with her children and her married life. But when tragedy strikes and she becomes heir to the Spanish throne, Juana finds herself plunged into a battle for power against her husband that grows to involve the major monarchs of Europe. Besieged by foes on all sides, Juana vows to secure her crown and save Spain from ruin, even if it costs her everything.  ( Source : Amazon ) 

[thejewishmuseum]

Happy birthday to Pop artist Andy Warhol, pictured here at the opening of Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century at the Jewish Museum in 1980. Warhol's series depicted "Ten Jewish Geniuses" as he called them: Sarah Bernhardt, Gertrude Stein, Golda Meir, the Marx Brothers, Franz Kafka, George Gershwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, and Louis Brandeis.

[ruminativerabbi]

Time Capsules

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of time capsules, the notion of packing up the specific things that most potently and meaningfully symbolize the culture of some specific place and time and sending them off to the future either by actually shipping them out—like the so-called “golden record” packed into both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to bring evidence of the earth’s culture to whatever alien civilizations they encounter when for the first time they come within a couple of light-years of a star around which revolve at least some earth-like planets in about 40,000 years—or merely by burying it in the ground for future generations to unearth and enjoy, like the one manufactured by Westinghouse and buried on the site of the World’s Fair in in 1939 with the intention that it remain sealed for five thousand years and then opened in 6939. What 70th century residents of Queens will actually do with a Sears Roebuck catalogue, of course, remains to be seen. Maybe they’ll order something from Sears!

There are a lot of these things, actually. Some are huge. The “Crypt of Civilization” time capsule created between 1937 and 1940 at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, for example, is actually a large room crammed full of things (including a set of Lincoln Logs, a bottle of Budweiser beer, an adding machine, some Artie Shaw records, and a baby’s pacifier, among thousands of other things including about 650,000 pages of microfilmed books and other documents), and is scheduled—if that is the right word, since there’s obviously no one to schedule it with—to be opened only on May 28, 8113. (The date was chosen because it was as far into the future as written historical records were believed at the time to bring us back into the past.) Others, of course, are much smaller. But all were created intentionally for the purpose of communicating through the transmission of specific things with people in the distant future.

And then there are accidental time capsules, rooms or boxes of things that were not set aside to communicate with the future…but which somehow managed to remain intact over centuries and thus successfully to offer people of a different time and place a glimpse into a world that would otherwise be lost to them almost entirely.

The Cairo Genizah would be the best example of such an inadvertent time capsule. Constituted of more than 300,000 documents that were stored haphazardly in a back room of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, the Genizah was neither hidden from view nor intentionally preserved for future readers…but ended up nonetheless providing a bird’s eye view into Jewish life from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries. Of particular interest were documents that provided a sense of what life was like for Jewish communities in North Africa and in the Mediterranean basin from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. The richness of the documents cannot be overstated: countless Jewish communities that were presumed to have left nothing at all behind emerged from the Genizah in all of their variegated richness. Personal letters, bills, contracts, k’tubbot, communal records, religious tracts, court records, children’s notebooks, prayerbooks—scholars whose names will forever be linked to the Genizah like Solomon Schechter or Shlomo Dov Goitein managed to rescue entire communities from oblivion merely by reading their literary detritus, much of it the kind of thing we routinely discard today either by burying it or just by pitching it in the trash once it’s been digitized. (To learn more, I suggest reading Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s book, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Genizah, published by Schocken in 2011 and very enjoyable and interesting.)

About five years ago, the world learned of a second such treasure trove, the so-called Afghan Genizah, a storehouse of thousands of Jewish documents and manuscripts, some of them more than a thousand years old, that were found in caves that the Taliban had been using as hide-outs. (Click here to see the article on the find published in 2013 in the Daily Mail in the U.K.) How exactly the cache of documents was found and by whom, and how they were brought out of the country remains unknown—and not only to me personally. Some choice documents were purchased—although it was not made public from whom—by the National Library of Israel. (Click here for a very interesting CBS News account of the library’s coup in acquiring these documents, which also fails to say how exactly they bought them and from whom.) But this “Afghan Genizah” is another example of an inadvertent time capsule, one that somehow managed to do what “real” time capsules are meant to do—convey the physical evidence of a thriving, rich, vibrant civilization now vanished almost entirely without a trace to people living long afterwards who would otherwise have known nothing at all about it.

And now I come to the real topic of this week’s letter: the treasure trove of documents unearthed just a few months ago in a church basement in Vilnius, Lithuania. What’s actually going on is hard to say. In 1991, a similar trove of documents was found in the same church basement…and now, 26 years later, they’ve found even more. (You have to wonder how big that basement is exactly. The new cache is made up about 170,000 pages of material, not exactly something you could overlook in a box in some corner!) But, whatever, the material has been announced…and its story is both arresting and horrific at the same time. The Nazis, as is well known, were planning to create some sort of ghoulish museum and research center in Frankfurt relating to the Jewish people once they finally finished exterminating them and, to that future end, an effort was made to gather together a trove of Jewish documents, artifacts, books, religious appurtenances, and manuscripts for use in this future archive. More weirdly still, a team of about forty Jewish scholars was appointed to gather this material in Vilnius—and kept safe from deportation to the camps until their work was done. (One, at least—the great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever—actually survived the war and went on to a career as a well-known poet in Israel, where he died in 2010 at age 96.)

That much was known all along. But what was not known was that these same scholars used the limited time they had been given to spirit away hundreds of thousands of documents that they hid wherever they could in the city, mostly in underground bunkers and in remote attics. Even in the context of the Shoah, the fate of the Jews of Vilna is horrific: at least 90% of the pre-war Jewish population of 160,000 souls was murdered by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators. The rest of the story is also fascinating. When the Red Army liberated Vilnius, some of the material was sent to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, whereupon a Lithuanian librarian named Antanas Ulpis started scouring Vilnius for more hidden Jewish documents, which he then gathered in the basement of the Church of St. George, where they remained for decades. The archive seems then to have been totally forgotten so that, when Lithuania became an independent country after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a quarter of a million pages of material were “discovered” in the church’s basement and transferred to the National Library of Lithuania. That was enough of a miracle…but now, all these years later, still more documents have been “discovered.” That’s a lot of “discovering” for hundreds of thousands of documents that weren’t hidden in the first place! But whatever the real story turns out to be, the bottom line is that the entire archive—all 420,000 pages of it—will now be housed in the National Library of Lithuania, where they will be digitized for use by scholars and general readers all over the world.

And what do we see when we peer through the looking-glass at a city that was once one of the most vibrant of all Jewish cities, the city that Napoleon (of all people) once referenced as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania”? It will take decades before anyone wades through all of this material, but some treasures have already been announced. A postcard written by Chagall. Five different notebooks of poems by Chaim Grade, perhaps the greatest of all twentieth-century Jewish authors. Some unknown letters by Sholom Aleichem. And the autobiography of Bebe Epshtein, a fifth grader writing in 1933. She must have been about ten years old then, which makes it unlikely she survived to adulthood. (She would be 94 if she were alive. I suppose she could be! But she hasn’t come forward. And the chances of her having survived are very slight.) What is chilling about her book—which will surely eventually be published in its entirety—is its ability to remind us, yet again, that the communities destroyed by the Nazis were populated not by professional martyrs but by regular people, by families whose daughters attended the fifth grade in the Yiddish School on Makove Street that Bebe attended and who fully expected to live long enough to enjoy seeing their children grow to adulthood and produce their own families.

Judging from the media coverage, the world is—at least so far—mostly interested in the recovered artifacts that relate one way or the other to famous people like Sholom Aleichem. But far more interesting to me personally is the material that relates to regular people, to parents and children, to teachers and pupils, to shopkeepers and their customers. In the same way that the greatness of the Cairo Genizah does not rest in the blockbuster finds that made it famous—the handwritten letters by Maimonides, for example—but rather in the portrait the huge number of documents relating to non-famous people creates of a vibrant, rich society existing in its time and place, this second trove of documents in Vilnius is going to be primarily important for the portrait it will offer of a culturally rich and dynamic community that was utterly destroyed in a tidal wave of violence and destructive zeal the likes of which the world hadn’t ever seen before and will, I hope, never see again.

I’ve occasionally asked myself what I would put in my own personal time capsule if I wanted to leave some trace of myself for my descendants in the thirty-first or forty-first century to ponder. My answer so far: a thumb drive with everything I’ve ever written on it, another with all our family’s photographs, my grandparents’ naturalization certificates, a video clip of me performing “A Rabbi Who’s Conservative”…and a sample of my DNA. That should do it!

  �u���E�

[docnad]

Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, 10 of 10 from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, 1980 #AndyWarhol's Jews of the Twentieth Century buff.ly/2H7L2Ve #GertrudeStein https://www.instagram.com/p/B1PRwz0h5G6/?igshid=128zyjk3k5e4r

[moodoofoo]

Andy Warhol Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century: Sarah Bernhardt, II.234, 1980   screenprint on Lenox Museum Board 40 x 32 inches edition of 200

[oncanvas]

The Marx Brothers from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Andy Warhol, 1980

Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board 40 x 32 ⅛ in. (101.6 x 81.6 cm) Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, USA

[mendingmusic]

Andy Warhol - Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (at The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens)